end of 2021 thoughts
Dear friends,
Happy Holidays! Though it’s a little early, the holidays are upon us. I’ve started to see messages in group chats and posts about people involved in festive things like drinking eggnog—which I am not personally fond of (although if anyone knows where/how to get tasty eggnog, I am all ears)—and hosting holiday family gatherings and the like.
I managed to get some reading in over Thanksgiving, and I want to spend this post talking about A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life by George Saunders, which so captivated me that I had to dedicate an entire post to it. Saunders is a professor teaching creative writing at Syracuse and the author of Lincoln in the Bardo, which I have not read yet (but will be checking out eventually) despite seeing the advertisements plastered on seemingly every bookstore window in the country when it came out in 2017.
In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, Saunders walks through a few of a his favorite Russian stories, which are printed in the book for easy reading, and walks through how he thinks about each one. Like it did for a lot of people, high school English class was more frustrating than illuminating when it came to understanding why many “classic” short stories are so interesting, and boy, do I wish I had George Saunders teaching me English in high school. His essays are very down-to-earth, and I could feel the passion he has for teaching and for these Russian short stories. One standout in particular was his essay on Turgenev’s “The Singers,” which I and many of his Syracuse students initially found dull and meandering (because of a long descriptive section with no obvious reason for why it shouldn’t have been cut), but Saunders managed to understand why the seemingly useless landscape and personality descriptions were vital for the story to work.
An aside I found interesting was that Saunders says The Grapes of Wrath was the first book he read that made him feel the power of literature to address the big questions in life when he first read it on a road trip in his early 20s. The Grapes of Wrath also had the same effect on me when I read it for class in high school. My memory is hazy, but I think we had read The Great Gatsby earlier that school year, which I had liked (and had used at every possible opportunity for the SAT essay, thank you to the green light!) though my teenage self found the flowery passages excessive. Since then, I’ve reread it multiple times in the years since and it’s grown on me a lot. The Grapes of Wrath’s simplicity and power and relevance to problems society still faces today got through to me in a way Gatsby didn’t, at least not immediately.
As I write this, Saunders has recently started a substack to do more essays on short stories. Find him here! I’m personally quite excited for more.
As this will be the last post before 2022, I wanted to do a special edition where I ramble about a few books that came out in 2021 that I liked the most (or just have a lot to say about).
Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid
This should come as no surprise. After reading The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo last year for a book club, I got caught up with the rest of her back catalog in time for Malibu Rising, her latest novel. My personal favorite of hers is Daisy Jones and The Six for its unique format and sheer believability of Daisy Jones and Billy, but Malibu Rising—which manages to be full of tawdry, tabloid-esque fun yet depicts the tight bond between the Riva siblings—comes close. The Riva siblings hail from Malibu and are tight despite everything.
TJR’s characters, as always, are superb. Nina’s and little sister Kit’s character arcs are excellent. Deadbeat dad Mick Riva starts out as an asshole and by the end, you realize he’s an even bigger asshole than you originally thought. There’s a TV show version of Malibu Rising in the works at Hulu. Daisy Jones’s TV adaptation is also in the works, so here’s to hoping they won’t mess it up.
Things We Lost to the Water by Eric Nguyen
I thought about writing about Klara and the Sun initially, but since the marketing was everywhere, I want to put a spotlight on something with less marketing behind it. Things We Lost to the Water is Eric Nguyen’s debut novel and is a family story following a Vietnamese family in New Orleans over decades. I was surprised to find out that Nguyen is from the Pacific Northwest, because he portrays the Vietnamese community in New Orleans and New Orleans itself with a lot of heart.
The descriptions of water were beautiful and frightening, which was I bet exactly what the author wanted me to think. I liked the use of diacritics on names and untranslated Vietnamese words sprinkled throughout without italics—it felt authentic to the characters’ lived experiences. Ben’s story in particular moved me. I won’t spoil the ending, but I hope things work out for him.
I guess that’s a wrap! For anyone reading, thanks for listening to me ramble about books. I’ll be back in 2022 with more. Until then, take care.
tina